First Cl(ass) Shrunken First Semester chapter 5 by maximally

“Okay,” Max said. “I’ll go.”

 

Ophelia’s face did something complicated—relief and heartbreak fighting it out under the smudged eyeliner. Sofia, for her part, clapped her hands like somebody had just agreed to a group project.

 

“Yes! First class, baby. You will not regret this. Or you might, a little, but in a fun way.”

 

She dug her fingers under the waistband of her pink-and-turquoise Fortuna booty shorts and shoved them down over the wide shelf of her hips. They didn’t go far—there was simply too much butt in the way, and the fabric was already fighting a losing war with her cheeks—but it was enough. The top of her crack yawned open like a soft, pale canyon, already slick with a thin film of sweat. From three inches tall, Max could see every freckle, every faint stretch mark, every glistening fold.

 

“Hop in,” Sofia said cheerfully. “Or, y’know. Get hop-ped in. Your call.”

 

Ophelia scooped him off the desk between two fingers. Her hands were shaking. She held him up to her face for a second, close enough that he could smell the vanilla on her breath and see the wet shine at the corners of her eyes.

 

“I’ll come over later,” she whispered. “As soon as Kali’s gone. Don’t—don’t let her do anything weird to you.”

 

“Define weird,” Max muttered.

 

Ophelia almost smiled. Then she leaned in and pressed a quick, clumsy kiss to the top of his head, which, at his current scale, was roughly the size of a grape. Before he could process that, she was stretching him toward Sofia’s waiting crack.

 

The heat hit him first. Then the smell—cheesy, eggy, gym-bag funk, concentrated and personal. Sofia’s cheeks parted around him with a soft, wet slide, and then he was being wedged down, down, into a damp, pillowy trench that closed over his head like a trapdoor. Soft flesh pressed in from both sides. His feet dangled somewhere near the small of her back. His face was mashed against warm, oily skin. He clamped both hands over his crotch out of pure reflex and tried not to think about how many hours this ride was going to take.

 

“There we go,” Sofia sang, hiking her booty shorts back up. The waistband snapped into place over the canyon, sealing him in between warm cheek and stretched Fortuna logo. “Snug as a—wait.”

 

A knock. Not a polite one. Three hard, flat raps that rattled the brass knob.

 

“Kidd.” Kali’s voice, low and bored and somehow worse for how little effort she put into it. “Open up. Those ugly boots outside say you’re home, and I’m not doing another lap.”

 

Ophelia went white. Sofia went still. Max, buried to the ears in a blonde’s butt crack, went nowhere at all.

 

“Coming!” Ophelia squeaked. She shot Sofia a look that could have killed a plant, then unlocked the door.

 

Kali Chandra filled the doorway the way a fridge fills a kitchen. Six-foot-four, nearly three hundred pounds of tan-skinned goth in a fishnet crop top, black leather pants, and combat boots that had probably crushed more than one bug—literal or otherwise. Her black-and-red hair hung over her shoulders. Red contact lenses caught the lamplight. She looked at Ophelia the way a landlord looks at a late rent check.

 

Then she sniffed.

 

Her nose wrinkled. She sniffed again, slower. A flicker of something—not quite a smile, not quite approval—crossed her face.

 

“Damn,” she said. “Was that you, Kidd? Didn’t think you had it in you.”

 

Ophelia made a noise like a stepped-on squeaky toy. “I—uh—”

 

“Oh, that was me,” Sofia said brightly, turning around with one hand on her hip. The motion ground Max’s face deeper into the canyon. “Hi! Sofia. Proserpina. Phee’s friend. I was just leaving, but since you asked—”

 

She cocked a hip, sucked in a breath, and let it rip.

 

 

It hit Max point-blank. There was nowhere to go. First came the cheese again—sharper this time. Then the eggs, deep and sulfurous, coating his tongue before he could even gag. And under it all, that same fake-sweet strawberry note, sun-warmed and wrong. His eyes watered. His lungs burned. He shoved his face sideways into a softer fold of cheek and prayed for death, or at least for oxygen.

 

Kali’s eyebrows went up a fraction.

 

“Proserpina,” she said flatly. “Figures. You people treat your guts like a hobby.” She looked Sofia up and down—the EVERYBODY POOPS tee, the stained Fortuna shorts, the beaten-up flip-flops—and dismissed her in the same breath. “Whatever. Kidd. We had a break-in last night. Someone went into the lab. You know anything about that?”

 

“N-no,” Ophelia lied. Her voice was a half-octave too high. “I was at the party. I left early, though. I got nervous.”

 

Kali stared at her for a long, uncomfortable second. Max, sweating in the dark, could feel Sofia’s pulse through the walls of her crack. He held his breath until his vision spotted.

 

“Mm.” Kali’s gaze flicked past Ophelia into the room—desk, flashcards, four-poster bed, the lingering haze of fart. “If you hear anything, you tell me. Not Heather. Me. That batch was special, and I am not spending my Saturday hunting some bug through every closet on campus.”

 

“Yes, Kali,” Ophelia whispered.

 

Kali’s eyes landed on Sofia again. “And you. Get out of my house. You smell like a gas station bathroom, and I mean that as a compliment, but Juno has standards.”

 

“Aww. Thanks!” Sofia beamed. “Phee, text me.”

 

“Sofia was just leaving,” Ophelia said quickly, herding her toward the door with both hands. “Just leaving. Right now. Bye.”

 

Sofia blew her a kiss, winked at Kali—who did not wink back—and flapped out into the hall in her beaten-up flip-flops. Kali was already turning away down the corridor. The door shut hard behind Sofia. Max heard the lock click. Then Sofia was walking, and every step sent a soft, rhythmic jiggle through the canyon that bounced him like a pebble in a waterbed.

 

The walk across campus took forever and no time at all.

 

From inside Sofia’s crack, the world was heat, sweat, and motion. Her cheeks flexed with every stride. The thin Fortuna shorts fabric rasped faintly against his back. Somewhere above him, he could hear her humming that same TikTok song, completely unbothered by the fact that she was smuggling a naked freshman across the quad in her butt.

 

They passed voices. Somebody laughed. Somebody said, “Isn’t that Bianca LaChance’s daughter?” Somebody else said, “Damn, she got fat.” Sofia called back, “Love you too!” without breaking stride.

 

Max tried to catalogue what he was feeling and gave up around the three-minute mark. It was gross. It was also, somehow, the safest he’d felt since waking up on Ophelia’s coffee table. Nobody checked a girl’s butt crack, much less a girl like Sofia. She had been right about that much.

 

Proserpina announced itself by smell before he saw anything. Stale pizza. Weed. Laundry that had been put off for a morally significant number of days. Sofia pushed through a door that scraped on the frame, climbed a flight of stairs that made her ass bounce like a pair of water balloons, and kicked open a door with her flip-flop.

 

“Home sweet dump,” she announced.

 

Then she flipped the lock, yanked her booty shorts down, reached back with two fingers, and peeled him out of her crack like a particularly sticky Band-Aid.

 

Max hit the open air gasping. He was shiny with sweat—hers, mostly—and his hair was plastered flat. He clamped both hands over his crotch and tried to blink the world back into focus.

 

Sofia’s room was… a lot. A ring light leaned against a desk buried under empty strawberry milkshake cups. Designer shopping bags slumped in one corner next to a heap of stained tees and Fortuna shorts that had clearly lost the war with her laundry schedule. Anime posters peeled at the corners. A half-eaten taquito sat on a paper plate beside a pile of cracked but visibly-new iPhones and iPads. The bed was unmade. The air smelled like her, concentrated: cheese, eggs, strawberry, and the faint chemical tang of whatever body spray she’d given up on weeks ago.

 

She set him on the desk, then flopped onto the bed hard enough to make the frame creak.

 

“You okay, little dude?” she asked, propping her chin in her hands. “That second one was, like, a six. I think that Kali chick brought it out of me.”

 

“I’m alive,” Max rasped. “That’s… something.”

 

“High bar. I like it.” Sofia grinned. Then her face softened, the way it had in Ophelia’s room when the junket came up. “So. Real talk. Before we do snacks or Netflix or, like, whatever. How do you feel about Phee?”

 

Max blinked. “What?”

 

“Ophelia. My girl. Short. Goth. Steals experimental serums and then cries about it.” Sofia rolled onto her stomach, which put her face level with the desk and her massive ass pointed at the ceiling like a pale twin moon. “Because she likes you. Like, actually likes you. I was coaching her about last night all last week. And she’s gonna spiral about this forever unless somebody tells her you’re not gonna vanish the second you get big again. Or, y’know.” She tipped her head. “If you don’t get big again.”

 

“I—” Max started, and stopped. His hands were still over his crotch. His face was hot. “I barely know her. We have class together. One time she asked if she could borrow my eraser. Then she… shrank me.”

 

“Uh-huh. And?”

 

“And she’s… cute,” Max admitted. “Shy. Not the worst person who could have found me in there.”

 

Sofia snorted. “She’s not Kali. That’s the whole problem. She got into Juno because her mom went here and paid for some big renovation they did a couple years ago. Now she’s stuck proving she belongs with a bunch of girls who treat guys like you like bugs.” She reached out and booped his head with one fingertip. “So. I’m asking. Would you be her boyfriend? Even if you’re stuck at action-figure size and your dating life is mostly being carried around in a pocket?”

 

Max stared at her. “You really weren’t kidding about wingmanning her, huh?”

 

“I am an excellent wingman,” Sofia said proudly. “And also I promised her I wouldn’t let her screw this up. Which, for the record, includes not letting you screw it up by getting in your head.”

 

He looked down at his own hands, at the tiny pale knees drawn up against his chest, at the giant EVERYBODY POOPS letters on Sofia’s knotted tee looming over him from three feet away.

 

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “That’s all I’ve got right now.”

 

Sofia’s smile went soft again. “That’s not a no. I’ll tell her you said something cooler.”

 

Max cleared his throat. The question had been sitting in the back of his head since Ophelia’s desk, and the cheese-and-eggs demo had only made it louder.

 

“So, speaking of… do you know any way to reverse this? Like—actually reverse it. Not ‘get used to it.’”

 

She hummed, rolling onto her back and staring at the ceiling. A glittery pink toenail picked at the opposite heel.

 

“Officially? No. Unofficially…” She tipped her head toward the wall. Through it, faintly, Max could hear something that might have been a keyboard, or a very committed goon session, or both. “My neighbor might. Hazel. Smartest person I’ve ever met, like, ever. Also the biggest gooner, and that might be saying even more.”

 

Max’s stomach did a small flip. “The one who said your butt has an ‘acquired taste?’”

 

“That’s her!” Sofia beamed. “The last time we hung out, she was working on a big batch of shrinking serum for some chick named Heather over in Juno. So, chances are she’s the one who cooked up whatever Phee stole. And if anybody on this campus can uncook it, it’s her.”

 

“Okay,” said Max, trying and failing not to get his hopes up. “So… what’s the catch?”

 

“No catch—but she will want something in exchange. Wink wink.” Sofia sat up and scooped Max into her palm. “We don’t have to go right now, though. You just got here. You smell like my crack. We could clean you up, put on a movie, wait for Phee to text.” Her green eyes sparkled. “Or I could walk you over right now and introduce you as my new roommate. Your call, little dude.”

 

Out in the hall, a door slammed. Somebody laughed. Weed smoke curled under Sofia’s door like a welcome mat.

 

Max looked at the wall. He looked at Sofia’s freckled face. He thought about Ophelia’s shaky kiss, and Kali’s red contacts, and a girl next door who might know how to make him tall again.